16 ms·

I've tried to use KDE/Plasma for a very long time, but everything just feels... wrong. I really dislike the layout of all their apps and menus, the sizes of ico

by Daunk 4y ago

I've tried to use KDE/Plasma for a very long time, but everything just feels... wrong. I really dislike the layout of all their apps and menus, the sizes of icons and buttons are weird, I dislike the fonts they use, and generally just everything seems "out of place". Having said that, I know you can customize the desktop and that's exactly what I've tried to do, but that has always resulted in such an unstable desktop that it's been nearly unusable, even after spending weeks on trying to fix things. An easier solution - for me - has been to just use GNOME and install 2 or 3 extensions and use the GNOME Tweaks tool to set things up the way I like them. Recently though, I've switched to Debian and decided to try out the Cinnamon desktop and it's been almost perfect from the start.

tifadg1 4y ago
Cinnamon feels like the best alternative to me as well, but it didn't work out of the box with my multi-monitor setup when I tried it a few years back.
Darmody 4y ago
You've just described my experience with KDE/Plasma.
irthomasthomas 4y ago
I'm a KDE user for a few years and I feel the exact opposite. Anyway, do you use the GTK file picker? Or have you swapped it out, somehow? That's my biggest problem with gnome. I'm frustrated every time it pops up. It has a long list of bugs that have been ignored for 5+ years. The biggest issue being that it only offers list view, no thumbnail view. So, doing anything with media files is extremely irritating. But, for some reason, so many projects still use it.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  My biggest pet peeve with Gnome is the attitude of the devs towards bug reports or criticism ("you're holding it wrong")[1] vs the KDE devs that acknowledge the bugs and work to fix them and add features the community is screaming for (after the infamous LTT video, KDE guys fixed the UX issue Linus complained). And don't get me started on the infamous Gnome filepicker. How are the thumbnails going? To which the response from the community has always been: "this isn't a problem since that's not how Gnome users are supposed to use Gnome" lol. Ok Gnome, you do you, just count me and everyone I know out. I find it a shame that such a toxic and user hostile project has become the default Linux DE on most distros today, while KDE keeps getting sidelined because people refuse to try it since they had a bad experience with it 10 years ago and seem to hold a grudge. I'm happy Valve chose KDE for the Steam Deck, though it is the most sane choice for it though. [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
  - irthomasthomas 4y ago
    Yeah I agree. I don't pay much attention, but I've seen a couple of occasions recently of some small issue, like a website thing being resolved in a couple of hours. No drama. Hope it continues.
- sph 4y ago
  > GTK file picker After a decade and a half, things might be moving on that front, if you're on GNOME. With the whole portal system desktop Linux has been adopting, GNOME will eventually use a Nautilus-lite widget, with thumbnails. There's a lot of Nautilus-related changes coming in GNOME 43 but I haven't heard any official news about it yet, so fingers crossed.
  - jraph 4y ago
    That's good news for me as a KDE user who obviously run GTk apps and gets exposed to the GTK file picker too often. KDE made a very good job making GTK look good in Plasma with the Brise theme, the file picker is almost the only annoying thing (with the header bar that a bit too big, but that's not a big issue). I just open files from the terminal or CTRL+L paste the path most of the time though, which works fine on the GTK file picker too, but the terminal cannot be a solution for everybody.
  - tremon 4y ago
    GNOME 43 Wow, I've been out of the loop for a long time. The last release I've been aware of was Gnome 3, and I use Linux daily.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
smallerfish 4y ago
> you can customize the desktop and that's exactly what I've tried to do, but that has always resulted in such an unstable desktop Unstable is a strange word here. When you said you "customized", do you mean you installed new themes and/or changed fonts/layout via system settings? Or did you run third party scripts / various rando commands listed on forums?
- knewter 4y ago
  I'm assuming he means "tried to modify the kde theme at all." I've run various distros (mostly arch now pushes bridge of glasses up nose) and incredibly regularly it's an absolute nightmare to set up. Like just using "get new stuff" to install a few themes and apply them will ask you which specific filename you want (I have no idea, there is nothing to help me know on screen). Then sometimes I have to restart plasma for the changes to take effect. Then compositing breaks and I have to change the compositor backend to make the process restart so my window previews work again. I have worked through all of this and much more and my kde setup is baller now on all of my machines. But I basically always launch gnome, because it is a significantly more polished system. This carries through to the mobile Linux experience as well.
  - smallerfish 4y ago
    Ah, I know what you mean - and yes I ignore themes/fonts/etc that require you to choose between files, and I don't download random DE hacks from forums or third party locations. My workflow is typically: Settings, [Themes/Styles/Fonts/Whatever], Install New [Thing], sort by highest rated, search for what I want, download a few, try them each out, stick with one and move on to next customization. It simply doesn't produce _instability_ for me (and I've done this maybe a dozen times over the past 10+ years, some time in the KDE 4 days) - though certainly, depending on the skills of the theme developer, some aspects may be janky. I think cursor changes require a restart (probably an X thing, and maybe no longer an issue on Wayland), but most of the rest are instant. To each their own. The lack of customizability in Gnome drives me nuts.
borplk 4y ago
I think it has become better over the years but as long as I can remember KDE has always had the "Designed but programmers that don't care about design" feel to it.
- distances 4y ago
  Years ago, with early KDE5, the KDE Visual Design Group was formed with one guy devoting a year for improving the KDE design with a democratic process. It was amazing to witness how quickly and efficiently the community iterated through ideas and nailed the details. I truly think KDE5 is a super clean, sleek, modern desktop environment mostly because of this effort. I always liked KDE, but the difference now to the previous version 4 is vast.
moondev 4y ago
I'm exactly the same. I even force myself every few months to give KDE an honest shot, but i'm so comfortable with gnome+gtk with dashtopanel+popshell anything else is jarring and borderline uncomfortable. I always come back.
- davidy123 4y ago
  Me too. I think there is a lot of deep thought in KDE, but it's too open to customization. I don't mean settings, I mean visual changes, and that leads to it looking like an unpleasant jumbly mess out of the box, and I'm skeptical that further customization will make that better. And they got a lot of important consistency things wrong that Gnome mostly addresses, like selectable text (almost) everywhere. Linux desktops in general horribly suffer from constantly reproducing desktops from a moment in the 1990s, where you have an anime background and some bright text on a dark background and you post it and everyone goes "ooh" and "ahhh" and "how did you do that." One glaring sign of this is design is called "art" rather than design. And you have a kind of mostly compatible Office suite (like a dog chasing after a car), one month you can do awesome actions in the file manager or have a live background but next month that's broken, and every month a new music player, as if any majority of people use local music and documents anymore. What an embarassing waste of time. It's sad because great ideas abound, like KDE's semantic desktop (which is basically a decentralized version of what Microsoft is building toward), Unity's 3d desktop (which failed when all that neato stuff meant nothing), scriptable desktops, distributed desktops, all kinds of glorious ideas. However it turns out the infinite monkeys creating desktops get distracted easily. They should start by deeply adopting ideas like design tokens. Here's another idea: give every widget and pane a unique identifer with version, and link them to the web using Linked Data, so at least the world of confusion support forums could feature some coherence, you could embed support in the widgets themselves. That would be a 2022 desktop.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
I feel the exact opposite. After I dropped macOS (I hate the direction they're going into) KDE was a breath of fresh air. It finally gives me configuration options back and the Breeze theme is already there most of the way. Not overly wasteful in terms of space like macOS and not even close to being as restrictive as that. KDE is amazing <3 In contrast I really hate what gnome is doing. Opinionated software is not something I want on my desktop. The huge (touch first?) window title bars, hamburger menus, limited configuration options etc, they're all wrong for me. I'll never use it. But this is the great thing about FOSS. There's something for everyone.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Same. I always really like/liked the Windows UX, up through and including Vista/7. MacOS had a lot of nice ideas, but ultimately I just want my computer to feel like "Windows but better". KDE is exactly that for me. Also, everything in KDE (at least in the Fedora KDE distribution) amazingly "just works". KDE has been an astounding revelation for me in how good FOSS can be, and I feel like no matter how much I donate, they deserve more than I am giving them.
- Daunk 4y ago
  I agree on GNOME, but the thing is that while KDE/Plasma allows me to change these things easily, doing so has always caused some issues down the line that have been a major headache. GNOME is a bit stiffer for sure, but using things like the extensions, themes and GNOME Tweak tool; you can fix all of the weird GNOME developer choices and get GNOME acting like a "proper desktop", without any issues down the line. But again, Cinnamon is my choice these days.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    I did try to spice up thing with copious extensions and tweaks. But the problem is that you'll need to be on a fixed version then (no rolling OS) because every update breaks some extensions and it can take a while for them to be updated. It became a buggy mess. The tweak tool is better supported but even there if you have an issue the community is very happy to point out you're on your own.
Jedd 4y ago
How long is 'a very long time'? I've been using Debian / KDE as my primary desktop & laptop environment since late last century, and it's been mostly a dream. The 4->5 transition involved some frustration, certainly, but it was relatively short-lived. Compared to forays into Unity & Gnome the experience was, even during those dark days, consistently better. Sizes of icons, buttons, fonts, window borders, etc etc are all customisable, so it's weird that was a sticking point for you.
- Daunk 4y ago
  As I said, I've tried to customize things, so how it looks is not a "sticking point". The issue is that once you start to really customize things, the desktop becomes unstable. For example, remove one application and all of the sudden the desktop might no longer work as it depends on so many things. I also don't feel like I should have to customize and work on the desktop for a few days just to make it usable. GNOME works fine once you use the GNOME Tweak tool, install a custom skin and a few extensions, it's just a few clicks done in 15 minutes. But again, my current desktop of choice is Cinnamon.
  - Jedd 4y ago
    Aha, fair enough. Your original complaint was around how things 'felt wrong', and mentioned layout of apps, menus, icon sizes, buttons, fonts etc -- all things that are pretty easy to tweak using the System Settings. It sounds like what you actually struggled with is breaking your environment by doing odd things with the distribution, which is an entirely different problem. If you remove packages and ignore the warnings from your distro, you should expect unpredictable results. If you remove packages that don't incur a warning from your package manager, and the result is a broken system, then you should file a bug report with your distro. I see you recently switched to Debian, but you didn't indicate whether you tried KDE on that distro. I've been on Debian GNU/Linux + KDE since last century, so I can confirm that this combination 'works fine here'.
7speter 4y ago
Cinnamon is a lot like windows xp’s interface, while kde/neon is more a combination of windows 7/10, at least in my opinion

by Daunk 4y ago

tifadg1 4y ago

Cinnamon feels like the best alternative to me as well, but it didn't work out of the box with my multi-monitor setup when I tried it a few years back.

Darmody 4y ago

You've just described my experience with KDE/Plasma.

irthomasthomas 4y ago

I'm a KDE user for a few years and I feel the exact opposite. Anyway, do you use the GTK file picker? Or have you swapped it out, somehow? That's my biggest problem with gnome. I'm frustrated every time it pops up. It has a long list of bugs that have been ignored for 5+ years. The biggest issue being that it only offers list view, no thumbnail view. So, doing anything with media files is extremely irritating. But, for some reason, so many projects still use it.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
My biggest pet peeve with Gnome is the attitude of the devs towards bug reports or criticism ("you're holding it wrong")[1] vs the KDE devs that acknowledge the bugs and work to fix them and add features the community is screaming for (after the infamous LTT video, KDE guys fixed the UX issue Linus complained). And don't get me started on the infamous Gnome filepicker. How are the thumbnails going? To which the response from the community has always been: "this isn't a problem since that's not how Gnome users are supposed to use Gnome" lol. Ok Gnome, you do you, just count me and everyone I know out. I find it a shame that such a toxic and user hostile project has become the default Linux DE on most distros today, while KDE keeps getting sidelined because people refuse to try it since they had a bad experience with it 10 years ago and seem to hold a grudge. I'm happy Valve chose KDE for the Steam Deck, though it is the most sane choice for it though. [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
- irthomasthomas 4y ago
  Yeah I agree. I don't pay much attention, but I've seen a couple of occasions recently of some small issue, like a website thing being resolved in a couple of hours. No drama. Hope it continues.
sph 4y ago
> GTK file picker After a decade and a half, things might be moving on that front, if you're on GNOME. With the whole portal system desktop Linux has been adopting, GNOME will eventually use a Nautilus-lite widget, with thumbnails. There's a lot of Nautilus-related changes coming in GNOME 43 but I haven't heard any official news about it yet, so fingers crossed.
- jraph 4y ago
  That's good news for me as a KDE user who obviously run GTk apps and gets exposed to the GTK file picker too often. KDE made a very good job making GTK look good in Plasma with the Brise theme, the file picker is almost the only annoying thing (with the header bar that a bit too big, but that's not a big issue). I just open files from the terminal or CTRL+L paste the path most of the time though, which works fine on the GTK file picker too, but the terminal cannot be a solution for everybody.
- tremon 4y ago
  GNOME 43 Wow, I've been out of the loop for a long time. The last release I've been aware of was Gnome 3, and I use Linux daily.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

smallerfish 4y ago

> you can customize the desktop and that's exactly what I've tried to do, but that has always resulted in such an unstable desktop Unstable is a strange word here. When you said you "customized", do you mean you installed new themes and/or changed fonts/layout via system settings? Or did you run third party scripts / various rando commands listed on forums?

knewter 4y ago
I'm assuming he means "tried to modify the kde theme at all." I've run various distros (mostly arch now pushes bridge of glasses up nose) and incredibly regularly it's an absolute nightmare to set up. Like just using "get new stuff" to install a few themes and apply them will ask you which specific filename you want (I have no idea, there is nothing to help me know on screen). Then sometimes I have to restart plasma for the changes to take effect. Then compositing breaks and I have to change the compositor backend to make the process restart so my window previews work again. I have worked through all of this and much more and my kde setup is baller now on all of my machines. But I basically always launch gnome, because it is a significantly more polished system. This carries through to the mobile Linux experience as well.
- smallerfish 4y ago
  Ah, I know what you mean - and yes I ignore themes/fonts/etc that require you to choose between files, and I don't download random DE hacks from forums or third party locations. My workflow is typically: Settings, [Themes/Styles/Fonts/Whatever], Install New [Thing], sort by highest rated, search for what I want, download a few, try them each out, stick with one and move on to next customization. It simply doesn't produce _instability_ for me (and I've done this maybe a dozen times over the past 10+ years, some time in the KDE 4 days) - though certainly, depending on the skills of the theme developer, some aspects may be janky. I think cursor changes require a restart (probably an X thing, and maybe no longer an issue on Wayland), but most of the rest are instant. To each their own. The lack of customizability in Gnome drives me nuts.

borplk 4y ago

I think it has become better over the years but as long as I can remember KDE has always had the "Designed but programmers that don't care about design" feel to it.

distances 4y ago
Years ago, with early KDE5, the KDE Visual Design Group was formed with one guy devoting a year for improving the KDE design with a democratic process. It was amazing to witness how quickly and efficiently the community iterated through ideas and nailed the details. I truly think KDE5 is a super clean, sleek, modern desktop environment mostly because of this effort. I always liked KDE, but the difference now to the previous version 4 is vast.

moondev 4y ago

I'm exactly the same. I even force myself every few months to give KDE an honest shot, but i'm so comfortable with gnome+gtk with dashtopanel+popshell anything else is jarring and borderline uncomfortable. I always come back.

davidy123 4y ago
Me too. I think there is a lot of deep thought in KDE, but it's too open to customization. I don't mean settings, I mean visual changes, and that leads to it looking like an unpleasant jumbly mess out of the box, and I'm skeptical that further customization will make that better. And they got a lot of important consistency things wrong that Gnome mostly addresses, like selectable text (almost) everywhere. Linux desktops in general horribly suffer from constantly reproducing desktops from a moment in the 1990s, where you have an anime background and some bright text on a dark background and you post it and everyone goes "ooh" and "ahhh" and "how did you do that." One glaring sign of this is design is called "art" rather than design. And you have a kind of mostly compatible Office suite (like a dog chasing after a car), one month you can do awesome actions in the file manager or have a live background but next month that's broken, and every month a new music player, as if any majority of people use local music and documents anymore. What an embarassing waste of time. It's sad because great ideas abound, like KDE's semantic desktop (which is basically a decentralized version of what Microsoft is building toward), Unity's 3d desktop (which failed when all that neato stuff meant nothing), scriptable desktops, distributed desktops, all kinds of glorious ideas. However it turns out the infinite monkeys creating desktops get distracted easily. They should start by deeply adopting ideas like design tokens. Here's another idea: give every widget and pane a unique identifer with version, and link them to the web using Linked Data, so at least the world of confusion support forums could feature some coherence, you could embed support in the widgets themselves. That would be a 2022 desktop.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

I feel the exact opposite. After I dropped macOS (I hate the direction they're going into) KDE was a breath of fresh air. It finally gives me configuration options back and the Breeze theme is already there most of the way. Not overly wasteful in terms of space like macOS and not even close to being as restrictive as that. KDE is amazing <3 In contrast I really hate what gnome is doing. Opinionated software is not something I want on my desktop. The huge (touch first?) window title bars, hamburger menus, limited configuration options etc, they're all wrong for me. I'll never use it. But this is the great thing about FOSS. There's something for everyone.

nerdponx 4y ago
Same. I always really like/liked the Windows UX, up through and including Vista/7. MacOS had a lot of nice ideas, but ultimately I just want my computer to feel like "Windows but better". KDE is exactly that for me. Also, everything in KDE (at least in the Fedora KDE distribution) amazingly "just works". KDE has been an astounding revelation for me in how good FOSS can be, and I feel like no matter how much I donate, they deserve more than I am giving them.
Daunk 4y ago
I agree on GNOME, but the thing is that while KDE/Plasma allows me to change these things easily, doing so has always caused some issues down the line that have been a major headache. GNOME is a bit stiffer for sure, but using things like the extensions, themes and GNOME Tweak tool; you can fix all of the weird GNOME developer choices and get GNOME acting like a "proper desktop", without any issues down the line. But again, Cinnamon is my choice these days.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  I did try to spice up thing with copious extensions and tweaks. But the problem is that you'll need to be on a fixed version then (no rolling OS) because every update breaks some extensions and it can take a while for them to be updated. It became a buggy mess. The tweak tool is better supported but even there if you have an issue the community is very happy to point out you're on your own.

Jedd 4y ago

How long is 'a very long time'? I've been using Debian / KDE as my primary desktop & laptop environment since late last century, and it's been mostly a dream. The 4->5 transition involved some frustration, certainly, but it was relatively short-lived. Compared to forays into Unity & Gnome the experience was, even during those dark days, consistently better. Sizes of icons, buttons, fonts, window borders, etc etc are all customisable, so it's weird that was a sticking point for you.

Daunk 4y ago
As I said, I've tried to customize things, so how it looks is not a "sticking point". The issue is that once you start to really customize things, the desktop becomes unstable. For example, remove one application and all of the sudden the desktop might no longer work as it depends on so many things. I also don't feel like I should have to customize and work on the desktop for a few days just to make it usable. GNOME works fine once you use the GNOME Tweak tool, install a custom skin and a few extensions, it's just a few clicks done in 15 minutes. But again, my current desktop of choice is Cinnamon.
- Jedd 4y ago
  Aha, fair enough. Your original complaint was around how things 'felt wrong', and mentioned layout of apps, menus, icon sizes, buttons, fonts etc -- all things that are pretty easy to tweak using the System Settings. It sounds like what you actually struggled with is breaking your environment by doing odd things with the distribution, which is an entirely different problem. If you remove packages and ignore the warnings from your distro, you should expect unpredictable results. If you remove packages that don't incur a warning from your package manager, and the result is a broken system, then you should file a bug report with your distro. I see you recently switched to Debian, but you didn't indicate whether you tried KDE on that distro. I've been on Debian GNU/Linux + KDE since last century, so I can confirm that this combination 'works fine here'.

7speter 4y ago

Cinnamon is a lot like windows xp’s interface, while kde/neon is more a combination of windows 7/10, at least in my opinion